Two Girls Down

by Louisa Luna

  “What’re Carrie and Soph up to tonight?” he asked.

  Nell didn’t look at him, pushed her food around with the sticks. About to lie, Cap thought.

  “Ridgewood, maybe,” she said.

  She didn’t elaborate. She was good. Answer only the question asked. No additional information.

  “I ran into Chris Morris at Valley,” he said. “Ruthie Morris’s dad.”

  Nell laughed and pointed at him.

  “I totally made you, Caplan.”

  “What?” said Cap.

  “Let’s go over the scenario,” she said, drawing an invisible chart on the table. “You run into Chris Morris, exchange hi-how-are-you’s; the conversation turns to your daughters, and somehow the subject of a dance at St. Paul’s comes up. He says, Ruthie’s going, isn’t Nell going too, and you act cool like, Oh maybe she just forgot to tell me about it. But you want to be subtle, and you figure I’ll crack if you ask about Carrie and Sophie’s whereabouts, because chances are they’ll be at the dance. Yes?”

  Cap leaned back in his chair and smiled. How could you not love the critical mind of this girl? She was literally the best of him and Jules—smart, funny, honest, kind. How could she not have twenty boyfriends? His answer was that she was too good for them. Her answer, if she would ever share that with him, would be considerably more frustrating: that those little Proactiv-smearing, dubstep-listening, malt-liquor-drinking punks at school weren’t interested.

  “What am I going to say next?” he said.

  Nell thought about it.

  “Why aren’t you at the dance, Nell?” she said.

  “Pretty good.”

  “So,” she said, leaning back like he was. “What do I say now?”

  He shook his head. “You’re better at this than I am, Bug. I don’t know what you say.”

  Now that the game was over, Nell suddenly seemed tired. They both started eating again.

  “I didn’t feel like it. St. Paul’s guys are pretty dumb.”

  “Dumber than DW guys?”

  “No, but the St. Paul’s guys act like animals around girls. Actually, that’s doing animals a disservice. The St. Paul’s guys are totally socially disabled.”

  “But Carrie and Sophie still went, right? They’re probably standing in a corner making fun of people. You could be doing that, too. You’re really good at that,” said Cap.

  “Okay, here’s the thing—they might be standing in a corner making fun of people, but deep down they really want one of those guys to come over and talk to them, and they make fun of them so they can counteract the possibility that no one will come over and talk to them. So I didn’t want to do that. It’s depressing.”

  She had apparently thought this through. She did not seem sad.

  “What about Ruthie Morris, does she stand in the corner too?” said Cap.

  “Uh, no. Ruthie’s on the dance floor, probably drunk, not wearing a bra.”

  “Really? Little Ruthie Morris?”

  “Dad, she’s not little anymore. She’s not the brightest bulb on the tree. And there’s a rumor she’s into autoerotic asphyxiation.”

  Cap choked on a bite of spring roll and coughed, felt the air squeak around the blockage in his throat.

  Nell found this hilarious and laughed. “Do you need the Heimlich?” she said.

  Cap shook his head, drank half his beer in one sip, and recovered.

  “I’m sorry, what was that?” he said.

  “Autoerotic asphyxiation,” she said, matter-of-factly. “When someone likes to get choked during sex.”

  “I know what it is,” Cap said, holding his hand up like he was stopping traffic. “How do you know what it is?”

  “I saw a Dateline about it.”

  “Really? A Dateline?”

  “Yes, Dad, not a big deal.”

  Not a big deal. Cap didn’t ask any more about the dance, or about braless Ruthie Morris. He pictured poor Chris Morris’s face when and if he ever found out his little girl was into the rough stuff. Then he looked at Nell and was thankful.

  Soon they finished eating. Nell put the plates in the dishwasher and went to the living room. Cap wrapped up leftovers, started another beer.

  “What movie do you want to watch?” she called to him.

  “How about one where someone crosses a mild-mannered guy and then he goes nuts and seeks revenge?”

  “Okay.”

  Cap put the containers in the fridge and heard the news coming from the other room.

  “That doesn’t sound like a mild-mannered guy seeking revenge,” he said.

  “There’s Junior,” said Nell.

  Now he felt obligated to watch. He stood in front of the TV and saw his old boss on the screen: “All we have to say right now is that these two girls are missing, and if you have any information, call us, email us. You can remain anonymous.”

  “What happened?” said Cap.

  “Two sisters from Black Creek were kidnapped,” said Nell. She stared at the screen and moved her eyes back and forth like she was reading text. Cap knew her mind was spinning with possibilities.

  “Have we seen the parents yet?”

  “They showed the mother.”

  “Custody dispute. I’m sure daddy has them. That’s what most of these are, Bug. They’re not even putting out an AMBER Alert yet.”

  He took the clicker from her and changed the channel. He didn’t want his former boss and co-workers and two kidnapped girls and their devastated mother in his quiet house. He wanted his daughter and his can of beer and a mild-mannered guy seeking revenge. Case closed.

  —

  In a room in a house in Central California, a girl stood on her hands. She was too old to be called a girl anymore, thirty-three, but she still felt like one. Not in the good way of having her whole life in front of her. In the bad way of being able to see only the edges of things, to peek around the corners when what you wanted was a city planner’s blueprints of the whole block seen from above.

  Her old boss in fugitive recovery, Perry, used to call it Little Bad and Big Bad. Little Bad was the teenager on the front porch with a Phillips screwdriver tucked into his pants. Big Bad was his daddy waiting inside with a loaded .38 and a pissed-off pit bull. There was always a worse thing that you couldn’t see, and it was closer than you thought.

  She breathed through her nose the way they taught her when she took three months of yoga. She’d quit because she couldn’t do what they asked. Focus on your breathing, they said, stare at a point on the wall, picture a string floating up from the top of your head and your chakras glowing blah blah blah. She got sick quickly of the instructor’s monologue, of the incense, of the women and their personalized mats. At the end when they all would lie on the floor in the corpse pose, she would look at the women around her, mouths open like fish, some actually sleeping with dumb smiles on their relaxed faces. Of the corpses she’d seen, none had looked so peaceful.

  The dead were contorted like zombies; they had holes in their heads; they were kids with limp limbs.

  So she quit, bought a book and learned on her own. Moved through the poses but didn’t do them all. Practiced the handstand until she could do it. First against the wall, then in the middle of the room. First for two minutes, then five, then ten. Now fifteen minutes in the middle of the room at four or five in the morning when she woke up. Her head was not exactly empty, but this was the time when she felt the most pleasant, the most like the way people on the street looked, she thought. People she saw in the grocery store or the gas station. Pushing babies in strollers or walking in a pair, or just alone hurrying to their cars, tapping away on their phones. Even if they weren’t smiling, even if they were yelling at their kids or worried about being late to work, she thought they had something on her, and she was never going to get it back.

  She scissored her legs down and stood up straight. Rolled her head around. She checked the time on her phone. It was 4:28. The sky was navy blue outside. She could hear some birds.<
br />
  She sat at her desk and opened her laptop, saw she had some new messages. Two junk, a message from her brother, and something she didn’t recognize.

  From mshambley@denvillearearealty.com. Subject: Missing Person Inquiry. The message read, “Hello Miss Vega, I read about you in regards to the Ethan Moreno case. I would like to speak to you about your services. My niece’s daughters have disappeared. Please find my contact information below and let me know when is a good time. Sincerely, Maggie Shambley.”

  She looked at the street address and went online, typed “girls missing denville pa” and read three articles, saw half a dozen pictures of the missing girls, their mother, the parking lot where they were last seen.

  She wrote: “Ms. Shambley, I am available now. Please call 916-567-1194. Best, Alice Vega.”

  She left her laptop, took a shower, got dressed. She pulled a travel bag down from her closet and set it on the floor. She packed it with clothes and a small pouch with a toothbrush and floss. She opened the lockbox where she kept her Springfield and placed it in a foam-lined hard case along with two magazines of twenty rounds each.

  Then she sat in the one chair at the kitchen table with her laptop and phone in front of her, her bag and the gun case at her feet. When Maggie Shambley asked how soon she could be there, she would say, “Tonight.”

  She felt the muscles in her arms twitch from the handstand. The idea is you close your eyes and empty your head until you feel the life in everything, in the trees and the birds and the man you hate. Until you feel the peace. For Alice Vega there was never peace when she shut her eyes. There was always, always a fight.

  2

  She arrived at Jamie Brandt’s parents’ house around 9 p.m. local time. There were five news vans at the curb with their networks’ names and numbers splashed across the doors. Vega parked on the opposite side of the street along a copse of trees and saw a dark sedan down the block that looked like an unmarked police car, thought she could make out a figure inside it. She got out and crossed the street, watched as all five of the van doors slid open and people jumped out.

  Vega actually didn’t mind reporters or the twenty-four-hour cycle. In the best circumstances they helped her and the cops she worked with, circulated names and photos of the missing so often that a viable tip was bound to come through. It didn’t matter that she was only one person—there were a hundred senior citizens and amateur detectives online who were happy to help catch a pervert or a criminal. But news outfits could also clog up good leads, spread bad information, start witch hunts. Then they were just dumb dogs ripping up a nice lawn, and Vega knew not to tempt them in the first place.

  About ten of them came toward her, all wearing jeans and fleece or windbreakers, except one of the women with a suit, neatly highlighted blond hair, and a mask of makeup that suggested she was the on-location correspondent. The rest Vega suspected were producers, looking for a peek into the house, or at least an emotional sound bite from a family friend. They started asking her questions, but Vega moved along and didn’t even look at them.

  “Excuse me, Miss…Ma’am—”

  “Are you a friend of Jamie Brandt’s?”

  “This could help Kylie and Bailey—”

  As soon as Vega hit the curb she left them behind since they couldn’t cross the property line; she walked up the drive to the house, a ranch-style place in some disrepair surrounded by a brown lawn. Motion lights came on as she approached the door and rang the bell.

  A woman answered, in her seventies, well-dressed with gold jewelry and tasteful makeup, her white hair cut short and styled into a wave. The news crews started babbling as soon as they saw her.

  “Miss Shambley, a statement for the eleven o’clock—”

  “Can we talk to Jamie—”

  “What’s the latest, Maggie?”

  The woman, Jamie’s aunt, Maggie Shambley, was nervous, didn’t know where her eyes should land as they jumped from the reporters back to Vega.

  “I’m Alice Vega,” Vega said, taking the older woman’s soft hand and shaking it, trying to hitch her attention.

  “Hi, Maggie Shambley. Come in, quick.”

  Maggie stepped aside.

  Vega followed her inside and shut the front door, saw beige carpeting and tan walls, plaid-patterned living room furniture, smelled the stale smell of cigarettes and pizza hanging in the air.

  There was a man sitting in a recliner, balding, overweight, who blinked at Vega like he couldn’t quite see her. Then his eyes went back to the television screen, to a basketball game with the sound off. A woman came from another room, tall but hunched over, wearing a pinkish tracksuit. She looked to be the same age as Maggie Shambley but had not turned out as well. She was like the Maggie Shambley that had been left out in the sun.

  “Those idiots still out there?” the tall woman said.

  “This is Alice Vega,” said Maggie, ignoring her question. “This is my sister, Gail, and her husband, Arlen White, Jamie’s parents. Jamie’s staying here for the time being.”

  Vega shook their hands. Arlen White did not stand, so she hovered over his recliner.

  “You want something to drink, kitchen’s right through there,” said Gail White.

  “I’m fine, thanks.”

  “Let’s sit,” said Maggie.

  She and Gail White sat on the couch. Vega sat on the ottoman, facing the three of them.

  “You’ll forgive my manners,” said Gail. “Or lack thereto. I am beat down tired.”

  She picked up a pack of cigarettes from the end table and lit one.

  “It’s been a hard couple days for everyone,” said Maggie.

  “I’m sure,” said Vega.

  “Thanks for coming so quickly,” said Maggie.

  “Which one is this again?” Arlen asked Maggie.

  “This is Alice Vega. She finds missing persons.”

  “We talked to a lot of police already,” said Gail.

  “I’m not with the police,” said Vega.

  “Who are you with?”

  “She’s a private investigator,” Maggie said to Gail, the tiniest edge in her voice, which made Vega think of a florist snipping a bud off a stem. “She has an excellent reputation.”

  “Well, great,” said Gail. “There’s been a lot of police, and they haven’t done a damn thing.”

  “I understand. Could I please speak to Jamie?”

  “She’s in the shower,” said Gail, pissed.

  “She’ll be out in a minute,” said Maggie, talking over her sister. “We didn’t know when you’d be here exactly—”

  Gail stood and went to the kitchen, which Vega could see from the living room over a countertop covered with papers. Vega watched Gail make a drink. Vodka from the freezer and Fresca from the fridge.

  “She doesn’t need to answer more questions,” Gail said. “What’s the use of that, exactly?”

  “You’re not with the police?” Arlen said from the recliner.

  “No, she’s not with the goddamn police, Arlen,” Gail snapped. She came back into the living room. Vega could hear the ice cubes knocking the edge of her glass. “She’s a detective.”

  A phone rang.

  “Get it, Arlen,” said Gail.

  Arlen picked up a cordless phone from his lap and began talking into it.

  “I don’t see what she can do that no one else can,” said Gail.

  “She’s here to help us, Gail,” said Maggie. “Could you please keep an open mind?”

  “Right, sure, everyone’s here to help. Two days and no babies. Those cops couldn’t find their asshole with a mirror and a flashlight.”

  Gail stared at Vega, fueled by her drink and two days of anguish plus a lifetime of petty frustrations, Vega assumed.

  Arlen hung up the phone, and all the women looked at him.

  “Sam again. She says Jamie can make another statement tomorrow.”

  “Sam’s my lawyer,” said Maggie to Vega. “She’s handling the press and setting up a call
center from my office.”

  Vega nodded, and they were quiet again. Gail began to pace.

  “So you find missing people, that right? How many you found so far?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “How many times you been hired is the real question?”

  “Eighteen.”

  This pushed Gail back for just a second. She took a sip of her drink and prepared to say something else.

  Then there was another voice, high and hoarse:

  “How many of them were kids?”

  Vega turned her head and saw Jamie Brandt emerging slowly from a dim hallway.

  Her face was pale, her eyes looked like dark cutouts in a white mask. Her hair was wet and straw blond. She wore sweatpants and a cropped T-shirt. Vega thought she couldn’t have been older than thirty.

  Vega stood up and said, “Most of them.”

  “When you found them, were they alive, or what?”

  Vega looked her right in the eyes and said, “Sixteen alive. One dead. And one alive but”—she tapped her head—“dead.”

  Jamie nodded, stepped forward.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “You don’t have to do this,” Gail said to her.

  “No, I want to talk now,” she said, sitting on the couch. “Maggie thinks you can help, great.” She took a cigarette from her mother’s pack, lit it, and said, “So fucking help.”

  Vega sat back down and stared straight at Jamie as if they were the only two people in the room.

  “Is there anyone who you think might want to kidnap your daughters?”

  “No,” Jamie said, exhaling smoke. “No one.”

  “Where is the girls’ father?”

  “I don’t know. Cops are looking for him. He took off after Bailey was born. I haven’t seen him since then.”

  Jamie’s eyes had a glazed look. Vega suspected she’d said it all to the police.

  “What kind of a man was he?”

  This made Gail and Jamie both laugh harshly and shake their heads.

  “What kinda man leaves a wife and two little girls?” said Gail.

  Vega ignored her and kept talking to Jamie.

  “Was he a drinker?” said Vega.

  Jamie shrugged one shoulder.